Ask Me Anything

So you’re a consultant that’s getting familiar with Office 365, having come from something like SharePoint or Exchange or perhaps Skype for Business on-premises and you think to yourself, “This platform probably has some limitations…. I can tune my back end storage to be performant… and my users are generally happy though we keep running out of space. I wonder what Microsoft can provide that’s better…”

All good thoughts and questions that I might find myself reflecting upon. I won’t deny that as a SharePoint IT Pro that occassionally dabbled in Exchange administration when I needed to, system tuning and upkeep can sometimes take a lot of time. When requirements are passed along from business owners around what end users need, I sometimes cringe, primarily when it comes to storage space – it’s difficult to keep up with the content that end users are creating (regardless of whether it’s duplicative or if it’s useful content), the needs are real. Sure, I could host my environment on the latest and greatest storage system and continually grow my storage spaces that my databases resided within (carving out storage from primordial storage is always fun, right?). And sure, I could go and order more disk for my system as I needed, but that also meant that I had to stay on top of things and learn the storage backend system and how to properly tune it as well as picking up other components of the surrounding infrastructure.

Of course, thinking through the other components that are required to keep an on-premises system operating such as needing to patch for system, application and configuration updates in addition to code deployments from developers also lends itself to keeping documentation up to date, all of which can be quite daunting.

Documentation? why would we need documentation? Sure, it’s good to have your own system properly documented in runbook of sorts, but also the documentation for business users and quasi-developers to understand the services and limitations surrounding the system. And if we become forgetful that our business users are the individuals that pay the bills then we probably need to take a reality check.

This seems to be a bit more than what a single individual can perform as a part of their job without becoming overwhelmed.

Perhaps we’ve become forgetful about what it’s like to leave the office at 430p because deployments of software to the server by our developers is a never ending troubleshooting battle. Or maybe we’re overwhelmed by the inabiity to keep up with end user storage requirements. Or maybe, we’ve determined that no matter how much we do in talking to end users about what they can and cannot do with SharePoint Designer or with JavaScript that it’s too late to enforce governance because the system has grown in a viral fashion.

Enter the Office 365 Service Description

So I’m not suggesting throwing in the towel of operating an on-premises system, though there’s definitely a lot of work. But continually having to review the work of others and then help to clean things up can be fairly difficult. That’s where something like Office 365 actually comes in to be incredibly helpful – especially when you start thinking about scaling to meet end user needs around storage. SharePoint site collections hosted on-premises can scale, but there’s a bit of work that is required when it comes to tuning the storage to be performant for users. Additionally if you’re thinking about using OneDrive for Business on-premises, it’ll require a bit of work to tune your servers to properly respond to requests in a way that doesn’t degrade the end user’s experience using the web interface.
To start with, look at what is provided for in terms of storage for an Office 365 Tenant.

So if you start thinking about this, that’s a lot of storage space. If you’ve got 1000 users, you’ve got 1.5 TB of total storage (1000 users x 500 MB + 1 TB). If you add in the storage that each licensed user receives for their OneDrive for Business you have approximately 1000 TB of storage that users can make use of before they start storing documents in SharePoint collaboration sites or Office 365 Groups.

Consider the backups that are required for this – does your backup solution provide for the ability to pull files back or host 1k users and all the storage needs that they may have? Further, are you able to quickly react when someone deletes a document (realizing that their first thing to do is check the recycle bin before opening a ticket).

Lots of reasons just around storage to start considering the Office 365 services that are out there for the Enterprise (or education or small business customers). Seems like there’s probably a lot to chew on if we’ve only scratched the surface here in a thought experiment as a consultant.

Consider taking a few minutes and a pot of your favorite coffee and head on over to the Office 365 Service Description documentation to start learning what the capabilities and limits are of the Microsoft cloud productivity and collaboration platform – https://www.office365sd.com

So Microsoft released Windows 10 to the world back on 29 July. Many of us went ahead and pressed that upgrade button.

And then we all wondered where 20 GB went.

The upgrade process to Windows 10 actually allows you to revert back to a previous version of Windows – you probably noticed you had a C:\Windows.old directory sitting around on your hard drive. Some of you might have thought to yourselves, “I don’t need that, I’ll just delete it.” STOP!

Don’t do that.

Go press the Start Button (yay it’s back!!!) and type in Disk Cleanup. Disk Cleanup will pop open and you’ll say to yourself, I want all the disk space back I can get – mind you, you can’t revert back to your previous version of Windows if you do this. . . Click on the button in the bottom left that says something about Administrative System Files. Disk Cleanup will go and run a scan of things not initially presented which include, “Previous Windows Installation(s)”.

If you want to reclaim the space and have already scavenged the Windows.old directory for items that may not have been dropped in your Documents folder or Desktop folder and are ready to commit to expunging those files, click the check box and then okay.

You’ll get another pop up, and you’ll confirm it and boom, you’re on your way to reclaiming some hard drive space.

There’s a Microsoft support page, though oddly it’s written for Windows 8.1.

Several different topics have come up in the community recently comparing technology providers and their capabilities and the best we can say is that in a lot of cases it’s like comparing bananas with battleships.

If you haven’t heard yet, there’s an Ask Me Anything SharePoint MVPs Expert Chat taking place on October 29th at 1 PM EST. The panel consists of SharePoint MVPs across the spectrum (and the world for that matter).

So what’s that mean? If you’re curious about SharePoint 2010 or 2013 or perhaps SharePoint Online or the greater Office 365 platform, come on over and ask a question. You’ll just need to have a Reddit account before hand so that you can be ready to ask questions. More information on the location will be available on the 29th in the SharePoint subreddit – /r/sharepoint